Stars in a Time Warp 28: Early Indigo Prints

Reproduction star by Becky Brown using 

Minick & Simpson's Indigo Crossing

18th-century quilts might feature these large-scale indigo prints fashionable for furnishings.

An 18th-century period room at the Shelburne Museum shows

the scale of early indigo prints. From a vintage postcard.

The scale on these bed hangings is enormous,.

Printing figures with indigo is difficult to do and to understand. We could go into the various ways these blue and white furnishing prints were produced but I'm not that sure what's a resist print, a discharged print, a block-printed design or one painted by hand. Experts wonder if they are domestically produced or imported from Europe or India.

So let's just focus on getting the look.

People wore them for clothing. Above a

European woman in traditional rural dress but fashionable

city dwellers wore these too.

Reproduction from Indigo Crossing by Minick & Simpson

This is an accurate copy of the vintage piece above.

Smaller scale though.

You are looking for large-scale blue and white prints, either navy blue or lighter blue.

Another take on the early indigo star by Becky Brown

Frame quilt from the Winterthur Museum collection.

This  print is done in light blues and dark indigoes.

Several of the prints recur in various early textiles.

"Very old blue and white resist print"

Gift from Florence Peto to Elizabeth Richardson

Collection of Western Kentucky University

One characteristic is a certain crudeness to the print.

This one is atypically crude. Most are more skillfully done, but you tend to see large areas

of color with no fine detail.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art put this double blue on the cover of their Interwoven Globe textile

show last year.

If you are thinking of doing a quilt echoing the Revolutionary War period,

you might consider a wholecloth indigo print at a giant scale.

 Reproductions

Indigo Crossings from Minick & Simpson reproduced the look

for quilters.

The designers with a strip quilt behind them showing the scale

of their largest print.

Midwest Crossings

Quilt kit and pattern by Jennifer Overstreet using the line

Nancy Gere's Low Country Indigo stars are

set with the large print from her line.

Stella Bella's block for indigo blue

has a bit of the scale of the old American indigo resist.

When you're working at 6" you can fool the eye as far as scale.

Reproduction block by Bettina Havig using a true indigo print

from Europe.

You may find it easier to buy upholstery fabric for these early indigos

Tucker resist by Waverly

A den in colonial style. 

Those period rooms (see the top of

the page) continue to define traditional interiors:

Gate-leg tables, red Oriental rugs and indigo drapes.

Batik Indigo from P. Kaufman

The upholstery fabric costs about twice as much as quilt fabric

but you don't need much to add an early period look to your stars.

And remember it's wider.

What to Do with Your Stack of Stars?

Stitch a Field of Patchwork.

The Sarah Johnson quilt by Barb Perrin

When these indigo prints were the rage in the late-18th century

quilters tended to focus on a central image floating in a sea of patchwork.

Hoopla pattern for this Shelburne Museum quilt repro

When Sarah Johnson made the original, dated 1828,

she used the same sawtooth star we are using.

A sketch in EQ7 of 72 six-inch stars around a center finishing to 18".

54" x 54"

Kensington Square by Val Naden reproduction

Val's focus was the John Hewson  panel

by Kathy Hall.

1811 Hewson quilt, Cincinnati Art Museum

The panel was inspired by Hewson's block-printed design with vase, birds and butterflies.

The quilt above alternates stars with plain blocks for the patchwork field. 

The field of patchwork with a central focus is a signature design in early quilts.

Quilt dated 1815. Rhode Island Project. Quilt Index photo.

This early quilt has a very small center focus in a field of patchwork nine-patches. Is that center white

square one of the Hewson Butterflies?

 Anna Tuel's Quilt, 1785, Wadsworth Atheneum

The field was often simple triangles.

Quilt dated 1806, Delaware Historical Society

But simple stars are also seen quite early.

Di Ford's Miss Porter's Quilt echoes a quilt dated in the 1770s.

Quilt signed R Porter,

Collection of the American Museum in Bath

Some recent quilts inspired by early design ideas:

Bettina Havig, Feathered Star Medallion

Leonie Bateman and Deirdre Bond-Abel for their 

Elegant Quilts, Country Charm book

Lizzy Mae's Medallion by Lori Smith

Whose pattern?

Dawn Heese's version of a Blackbird Design. 

Update the look by placing the focus to one side. Offset symmetry is a characteristic of Blackbird's designers Barb and Alma.

I found this one on Laura Nagel's Pinterest board.

One More Thing about Early Indigoes

The International Quilt Study Center and Museum has an online show, Indigo Gives America the Blues, in which they explain various kinds of indigo printing.

They call this week's style

American Indigo Resist:

Mid to Late - 1700s

http://www.quiltstudy.org/exhibitions/online_exhibitions/indigo/indigo_introduction.html

Slave quilts and Code

An antebellum silk quilt

In November 4, 1853, The Richmond Dispatch recorded the handmade items seen at the local agricultural fair.

"Silk bedquilt made of cast off dresses, by Jane, at night. Mrs. Evans."

Everyone in slave-holding Virginia would have understood the code.

Jane, with no last name, was a slave, probably belonging to Mrs. Evans. She made the quilt "at night," meaning on her own time after her daily duties were over. The materials were "cast off dresses," silks that were no longer fashionable, probably from the wardrobes of the slave-holding family.

Silks in plaids, stripes and solids fashionable for

mid-century women's dresses

Did Jane keep the quilt since she made it on her own time at night?

Also notice under the mention of a "mammoth cake of soap" there is a straw chair: "The handiwork of an old Virginia darky." Perhaps this man with no name at all was a free black.

Another provacative reference I recently came across:

In her book The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895, Jane Turner Censer quotes Jane Alston writing her oldest daughter Lucy:

"Well, my quilt is in the frame, and Ella [her youngest daughter] and I are putting some regular darkey quilting on it."

This code is a little harder to understand but author Censer explains that post-Civil-War changes including poverty and lack of slaves forced women into doing work they considered beneath them. Work traditionally done by slaves was hard to reconcile with one's aristocratic self-image.

"Regular darkey quilting" perhaps a code for labor-intensive handwork?

Pre-Civil-War quilt with heavy quilting, cording  and stuffed work

in the pattern we often call North Carolina lily.

So we can conclude that at least in the Alston family of Warren County, North Carolina, the slaves had done the quilting. Is it true, as Censer writes, that "antebellum planter wives...almost never quilted?"

The answers would require a lot more evidence, but both descriptions add a little to our understanding of pre-Civil-War quilts from slave-holding states.

Another heavily quilted variation of the Carolina Lily

Jane Crichton Alston's letters are unpublished. See more about them in the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/w/Williams,Lucy_Tunstall_Alston.html

Stars in a Time Warp 27: Quercitron and Arborescent Chintzes

A drab-style reproduction star by Bettina Havig

 Detail of a quilt from Stella Rubin's shop

Reproduction block by Becky Brown

That curious yellow was originally printed with quercitron, a fast yellow vegetable dye suitable for printing.

The fugitive yellow (not quercitron) is barely visible in this chintz.

When it was brighter the leaves were greener.

Yellows in natural dyes are abundant, but fast yellows suitable for printing were hard to find. Yellow’s unreliability is a reason we see so many blue leaves in old botanical chintzes like the one above.

Vintage quilt

The yellow figure in the border may have

been printed with quercitron dye.

Textile historian Peter Floud considered the discovery of a faster, printable yellow England’s major contribution to 18th century-dye chemistry.

Vintage pillar print possibly printed with quercitron

About 1785 Englishman Edward Bancroft visited Massachusetts and found Americans using yellow dye from the bark of the North American black oak tree. He obtained an English patent for black oak bark and coined the word ‘quercitron" from the Latin quercus for oak and citrina, probably referring to a yellow fruit.

Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Floud's example of a "drab-style" print is this

pillar print printed with quercitron.

Note it's also printed with a fancy ground.

When Bancroft’s fifteen-year patent expired in 1800, British mills created a rage for the dye called "bark" in the trade. It was inexpensive; it was colorfast and the color combinations were novel. Quercitron's palette of yellow, green and brown came to be called "drab." 

Back of a quilt  dated 1846 from the 
Nickol's collection at the Mingei Museum

Green, brown and yellow: the major characteristics of drab-style prints.

Pansy, vintage print  from the collection of the 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Becky's repro star uses the same quercitron copy as Bettina's,

courtesy of my scrapbag. I've been collecting this

color combination for quite a while.

My dictionary still defines drab as a light olive brown, but today's common meaning is dull or commonplace. Describing quercitron’s color scheme as drab style confuses us because there is nothing dull or commonplace about it. Bright mustards set against dark brown grounds with shades of olive green can be quite vivid.

Drab-style birds in a Baltimore album block

A drab-style print borders this hexagon quilt

pictured on the cover of Massachusetts Quilts

Jeremy Adamson dated the English fad for drab prints to 1800-1812 but the fashion seems to have continued in American quilts through the first quarter and into the 1830s and ‘40s.

French swatchbook with several drab syle prints, 1825

You see a lot of mustard yellows and red, but

technically these are not drab-style.

Drab-style prints included all the shades possible from quercitron, including a blue. Florence Montgomery made the point that is really the absence of reds and purples that defines drab. In theory, dyers could print cotton in drab style shades first and then print with madder to obtain the full range of colors from yellow and green through red and purple, but this doubling of techniques was expensive and, she noted, rarely done.

Vintage chintz about 1825

I include olives, browns and mustards with red

in the quercitron category of vintage prints.

Drab-style prints were a favorite for arborsecent prints---chintzes with gnarly tree branches.

Arborescent chintz with a pale green background.

The overdyed greens and bright yellow indicate this has

not been printed with quercitron in drab-style. It's a full color chintz.

An arborescent chintz on the right from the Connecticut project. 

Photo from the Quilt Index

Palampore sold at Christies

The gnarly tree is an offshoot of the tree-of-life imagery.

An India Print Bedspread or a real palampore in a decorating suggestion?

Reproductions

Becky's bright block has a chintz with that olive/mustard color palette

AND a fancy ground.

Jo Morton's Bird Chintz is an arborescent chintz

in quercitron colors.

You may have hesitated to buy these mustard yellow reproductions

but now you know why you need them.

From Nancy Gere

And Judie Rothermel

From Collections for a Cause: Community

Petra Prins's Dutch Prints

An upholstery grade arborescent repro

This week you can stitch stars in 

• quercitron yellow,
• prints in drab style or 
• arboresecent chintzes in any shade.

Drab-style stripe in a repro by Becky Brown

What to Do with Your Stack of Stars?

Alternate a Different Star.

Quilt signed ELH; Dated 1839

Collection of the Shelburne Museum

ELH's star has been one of my favorite quilts since I first saw

it in black and white in a Shelburne Museum catalog.

Carol Jones and I made this baby quilt from

the Seneca Falls fabric collection for Moda.

The other star in the pair is #2141c in BlockBase.

Carrie Hall called it Ohio Star in her 1935 book but

this star was pieced into patchwork before there was an Ohio.

Polly Green's interpetation of the 1839 Shelburne quilt

Lori Smith calls it Virginia's Star.

It looks good in shades of quercitron.

Virginia's Quilt by Cupcakes and Daisies

Any Sawtooth Star would coordinate....

Here's Block Base #2146, a variation on the 

Barbara Frietchie Star.

One More Thing About Quercitron

Vintage medallion quilt

Quercitron can be printed with mordants similar to the way madder is printed. Different mordants produce different shades of olive, brown and yellow in that characteristic mustard shade. Mordant printing is extremely useful because the printer applies different mordants (usually metal salts) and then dips the fabric in a single dye bath. It's a relatively inexpensive process and the registration is good as in that scenic bridge print in the quilt above..

Read more about quercitron and drab at this post:

http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/06/drab-colors-quercitron.html

Reproduction star by Becky Brown

If you prefer olive greens to bright, over-dyed green calicoes

you can tell everyone you are focusing on early drab-style prints.